Archive for the 'News' Category

Daniel Honan, BigThink.com

In a very short time, Tim Tebow has become the most polarizing NFL player in a generation. There are many reasons for this, but one thing that has fascinated fans and foes alike is Tebow’s apparent ability to rally his team, the Denver Broncos, when it matters the most.

Tebow’s performance on the field is extremely uneven. He’ll often stink it up for three quarters only to become what The New York Times describes as “a Hall of Fame candidate in the Fourth.” His efforts contributed to a crucial six-game winning streak that helped land Denver in the playoffs, and last week Tebow led the Broncos to a first-round victory with a touchdown pass in overtime. What is the explanation for his success? And how has Tebow been able to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds again and again? Do certain athletes possess the ability to elevate their game simply by willing it? Does Tebow share a common gene with Derek Jeter and Michael Jordan? Or is it divine intervention (43 percent of Americans believed so in a recent poll)?

If you are like me and believe that God has greater concerns than the outcome of a football game, you are left in search of another explanation.

Let’s try this one:

-0.29 WPA, -13.6 EPA, -0.04 WPA/G, -0.05 EPA/P, 38.0 SR%, 34.3 %DEEP, 4.4 AYPA

What do these numbers mean? These mathematical measures of Tebow’s performance are known as sabermetrics. These measures include things like win probability, win probability added, expected points added per play, etc. A full explanation for what these statistics mean can be found here, but the bottom line is that during the first six games that Tebow started that are measured above, his numbers were terrible. In fact, sabermetrics shows us that every time Tim Tebow touched the ball he cost his team points in comparison to the performance of the average NFL quarterback. And yet, the Denver Broncos won five of the six games sampled here. So what’s going on? More…

From dezeen magazine

Here are twelve posters that have been created by leading British artists to celebrate next year’s London Olympic and Paralympic Games.

To see more…

Hartosh Singh Bal, 3 Quarks Daily

In 1977 an Australian media tycoon changed the world of cricket. His name was Kerry Packer, but in his approach to life and business there was little to separate him from Rupert Murdoch. Before Packer intervened, a game of cricket lasted five days, was played by players wearing white and required a level of athleticism that would not shame a Chess or Scrabble champion.

Packer’s intervention was the result of a tussle with the Australian Cricket Board over TV rights for his Channel Nine operations in Australia. He set up a league of his own outside the control of International Cricket Council, a coterie of largely English gentlemen who had run the game internationally as their fiefdom. Packer paid out large sums of money to attract the best players across the world, dressed them in colored clothes, reduced the duration of the game to a day or sometimes a night when it was played under floodlights. By the time of his reconciliation with the ICC a couple of years later, he had changed the game forever.

Thirty years later, as the power and wealth of the Board of Control for Cricket in India increased thanks to a growing economy and India’s success in the very form of the game promoted by Packer, the ICC already under siege, ceded a large measure of power to the Indian body which launched another league of its own, the Indian Premier League (IPL). Unlike the Packer League, the IPL, which is as avowedly commercial in its motivations, has done little to change or improve cricket. Rather, in bringing together Indian corporate interests and politicians looking for both money and power through their association with the game, the game as organized by the IPL has come to resemble a bout organized by the World Wrestling Federation. In the process IPL has actually managed to make Packer look like a visionary saint.

To Read More…

By Greg Bishop, The New York Times

For E. Gordon Gee, the athletic scandal that humbled the mighty Ohio State football program overshadowed an otherwise normal, productive January, a month bookended by the Buckeyes’ Sugar Bowl victory and a business trip overseas. Still, Gee boarded the flight home from China firmly behind his football coach.

He had no idea what awaited him — the most difficult stretch, he would later say, in three decades spent running some of the country’s largest, most prestigious universities.

On a layover in Chicago, Gee settled into the American Airlines Admirals Club and called his office to check in. Herb Asher, counselor to the president, dispensed with the usual pleasantries. “You won’t be happy with this,” Asher started. Then he delivered the bad news.

The football program Gee often referred to as the “university’s budget running up and down the field” would soon be under N.C.A.A. investigation for apparent rules violations that included players selling memorabilia for cash and tattoos. Worse yet, e-mails that shattered Coach Jim Tressel’s earlier explanation of ignorance had been uncovered in Gee’s absence.

To Read More…

Photo: David Maxwell for The New York Times

By David Clay Large, The New York Times

FEW Olympics are as famous as the 1936 Berlin Games, whose 75th anniversary falls this month. The publicity that accompanied the competition, held under the watchful eye of Adolf Hitler, supposedly tamed the Nazi regime, if only temporarily — a story that has since justified awarding the Games to places like Soviet Moscow, Beijing and Sochi, Russia, host of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

But much of that story is myth. Indeed, the Olympics gave the Nazis a lesson in how to hide their vicious racism and anti-Semitism, and should offer today’s International Olympic Committee a cautionary tale when considering the location of future events.

When the committee awarded the Olympics to Berlin in 1931, Hitler was not yet in power. But by 1936 there was little question that anti-Semitism and racism lay at the heart of the Nazi ideology: the so-called Nuremberg Laws, which codified policies to isolate Jews and other minorities from German life, had been approved the year before.

To Read More…

Illustration by Lulu Wolf; Photographs from Times Wide World Photos; Image Courtesy of the New York Times